New Opterons extend AMD benchmark leadership

AMD'S INTRODUCTION TODAY of new Opteron processors for one, two, and four-way solutions was also an opportunity to release new benchmark results as well.

These new processors have increased clock frequency by 200MHz (10%), and introduced PC3200 memory support.

The benchmark updates tell us the following story, here compared with rival Xeons from Intel:

SPECint®_rate2000 2P Servers
Opteron 248 33.1 (109%)
Opteron 246 30.5 (100%)
Xeon 3.2 GHz (1 MB L3) 28.3 (93%)
Xeon 3.06 GHz (1 MB L3) 27.4 (90%)

The use of PC3200 memory gives, Opteron a further boost:

SPECfp®_rate2000 2P Servers
Opteron 248 31.6 (106%)
Opteron 246 29.9 (100%)
Xeon 3.2 GHz (1 MB L3) 21.1 (71%)
Xeon 3.06 GHz (1 MB L3) 20.8 (70%)

Xeon is not even in the same league, and its scaling is poor against Opteron.

SPECweb®99_ssl 2P Servers
Opteron 248 2240 (112%)
Opteron 246 2000 (100%)
Xeon 3.2 GHz (1 MB L3) 1440 (72%)
Xeon 3.06 GHz (1 MB L3) 1382 (69%)

SPECjbb®2000 Performance 1P Servers
Opteron 248 38222 (109%)
Opteron 246 35115 (100%)

Another solid Opteron showing. I couldn't find any recent submissions for Xeon, for some reason.

SPECjbb®2000 Performance 2P Servers
Opteron 248 64427 (106%)
Xeon 3.2 GHz (1 MB L3) 61096 (100%)
Opteron 246 60865 (100%)
Xeon 3.06 GHz (1 MB L3) 57653 (95%)

Xeon is now showing respectable performance, but it's still not good enough to overcome Opteron.

SPECjbb®2000 Performance 4P Servers
Opteron 848 113473 (105%)
Opteron 846 107786 (100%)
Xeon 2.8 GHz (2 MB L3) 94405 (88%)

Opteron's ability scale is apparent here and it doesn't need to double its effective cache to prove its performance credentials.

The above benchmarks that AMD has updated are dated as of today and are currently under SPEC submission. Where newer SPEC results have been submitted, I've added those as well.

AMD has also added a new HPC benchmark section as well - at the bottom of this page. The IBM eServer 325 link shows that this server has broken yet another benchmark record by setting the fastest result ever achieved for SPECenvS2002 - 2375. The Stream results show a two-way Opteron platform giving its Itanium2 counterpart a very hard time. What's interesting to note here is that the Itanium platform was configured with three times more processor cache and memory.

AMD's eighth generation AMD64 platform has already demonstrated performance leadership in the server, workstation, cluster, and desktop environments.

See also
AMD adds three models to its Opteron range
IBM Opteron-based eServer demolishes HP Superdome
AMD's Opteron: Does it measure up?
Opteron delivers workstation performance leadership

L'INQ
Intel's surprise chip is competitive, but doesn't beat AMD's top Athlon processor